The bike travelled by ship courtesy of Kiwi Car carriers and I by plane. Arriving at Narita may be daunting but nothing compared to traveling to Tokyo to board the bullet train to Osaka. The benefit of a train ride as opposed to air travel is that one does get to see something out the window even if it is going past at 700 kph. (Considerably higher than the 250 kph that the Euro train travels at between London and Paris). The fascination that I developed was with what I later discovered was tea planings. They are beautifully lined up and down hillsides, clipped in a half round rows and not a weed in sight. Immaculate was the impression.
Osaka is a very modern city rebuilt after a major earthquake.
The reason for being in Osaka was to collect the bike. An agent was available thankfully, bucause having riddent the bike away from the boat and to customs, then obtaining a release, the call came later that night that the customs man of 25 years had never actually had a vehicle come into Osaka and had made a mistake with the documents. He had also failed to check that there was in fact a bike. So I had to return to customs and take a "picture" as evidence that there was in fact a bike. So we did and he recovered face and I was "free to go".
It took a few days to adjust to the roads, the traffic and get up the road to Kyoto where I was expecing to see the famous blosoms, and I did find some, then on past Fuji to a coastline that can only be described as wonderful, steep rocky, lots of villages in small places, wonderful woodlands, boats and in general a most picturesque location. It was the Itzu peninsula where I did get a view of Juji's top, which was a bonus, and round every corner another mini Monaco. Really a very slow 200km but a wonderful days ride.
So I arived in Toyko, alone and unaided apart from a rather unreliable GPS however I made it.
I was prepared then to ride with the group that was due to depart on the 24th.
No comments:
Post a Comment